Modern Warfare - Information Warfare?

Submitted by erasparsa on Sat, 11/14/2009 - 12:00

With Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 out in the market, selling millions of unit worldwide, having the biggest video game launch ever beating even the largest music sales and video game sales record previously owned by Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm just wondering, how modern is Modern Warfare 2?

With the current state of information technology of most technologically advanced countries, they could do lots of things that would render physical combat to a stopping halt. Using satellites, spies and drones to steal battle plans and positions of soldiers and war machines, to track of influential soldiers or person to make assassination easier, to disrupt air traffic systems, to gather information on all possible combat locations, to tap, decrypt and falsify information like eaves dropping and sending false messages to the enemy, intercept their wireless communication system or even penetrating their cellular networks. And to a country that relies heavily on information, hacking into and taking over their network systems be it wired or wireless, disabling their life supporting utilities like electrical, water and gas plants, disrupt financial data to prevent banks from reconciling their financial transaction and stock exchange to go haywire and finally the country economic systems. Imagine all that happening to your country just before the troops and lethal forces comes in and invade.

Wouldn’t that be more terrorizing?

One might argue that it is not there yet. But information warfare is here. With people using public cloud computing to crack PGP encrypted files, what kind of computing power do you think the central governments agencies, such as NSA have for example? Secure networks? I’ve seen people sending private messages using their company systems, revealing all internal networks IP addresses, operating systems, mail client and server versions and usernames. People using wireless devices while at the same time connected to their internal networks. Third world countries that do not rely heavily on IT? Information warfare does not rely on the internet only. And now most countries have internet and unfortunately Microsoft operating systems on their desktops, go figure. And small groups of people are already hacking into cell phones and do man-in-the-middle attacks on satellite network transmissions.